Digging Games In The Amazon Cloud

A video game with a rapidly growing following entered the cloud this month. Minecraft is a building game that lets players construct essentially whatever they want — including the Starship Enterprise. Markus Persson launched development of the game in May 2009. Eighteen months later, game sales have surpassed the 1 million mark. And Minecraft is still in beta.

(Full disclosure: I’ve been known to occasionally engage in creating building activities (read: waste time) with Minecraft.)

Persson reported Minecraft’s cloud plans January 18 on his The World of Notch blog: “Once again, minecraft.net is more popular than the poor old server can keep up with, so we’re upgrading… We’ve got a huge amazon cloud server which we’re moving the main server to.”

Most of the site migrated to Amazon in recent weeks. Persson describes the set up as five servers behind a load balancer, a dedicate server for payment processing, and a dedicated server for ingame authentication and login. The latter, he said, won’t go live until the game’s launcher is updated.

Minecraft’s Amazon move, of course, just one example of the cloud’s gaming vertical. GigaSpaces Technologies, Latisys, Rackspace Hosting, Terremark Worldwide can also point to online gaming customers.

Game streaming services are another aspect. OnLive debuted its cloud gaming service last June. And Playcast Media Systems recently announced $10 million in Series B financing.

Momentum appears to be building. And while all markets eventually cool, gaming, for now at least, looks like the gift that keeps on giving.

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